This week, food and nutrition education took center stage at the 2018 SXSW EDU Conference & Festival when Chartwells K12, a team of chefs, dietitians and operators who cook and serve meals in more than 4,000 schools across the country, took its Mobile Teaching Kitchen to the annual event that brings together teachers, school administrators and education innovators in Austin, Texas.

Give kids healthy meals, and they'll eat healthy today. Teach kids to prepare, cook and taste delicious, healthy, foods and they may eat healthy for a lifetime. That's the lesson Chartwells K12 is offering schools with a new state-of-the-art Mobile Teaching Kitchen that combines cooking and curriculum to inspire, educate and drive healthful change across America.

​Chicago, IL, Chartwells K12 and KidsGardening.org announced today the winners of the 2016 Eat. Learn. Live. & Grow School Garden Grant. Through Chartwells’ exclusive partnership with KidsGardening.org, 23 K-12 schools were selected to participate in the grant program awarding over $27,000 to schools from coast to coast.

Pilot Light and Chartwells K12 are teaming up to influence a generation by transforming Pilot Light's innovative, hands on and Common Core-centered classroom lessons into the healthy meals Chartwells K12 serves in school cafes. The partnership will help nurture a new generation of food educated, healthy eaters who not only understand what's good for them and why, but that nutritious foods taste great!

Joined through the shared belief that learning through gardening can be a positive part of every child's education and personal development, Chartwells K12 and KidsGardening.org are excited to introduce the 2016 Eat. Learn. Live. and Grow School Garden Grant and Webinar Series. The grant and webinar are available to any K-12 school seeking to start a new or enhance an existing school garden for students.

Chartwells K12 and KidsGardening.org today launched the eat. learn. live. School Garden Program, a first-of-its-kind comprehensive resource to help guide educators through the process of successfully developing, growing and sustaining school gardens regardless of space, climate or resources they may have currently available.

The food and nutrition experts at Chartwells K12 are bringing greater clarity and transparency to school dining and making paper menus a thing of the past through a new partnership with Denver-based technology developer Nutrislice, Inc. Together, Chartwells K12 and Nutrislice are putting digital menus and nutrition information into the hands of millions of families nationwide including nutrition analysis, ingredients, allergens and photos, easily available on-the-go via smartphone, email or web.

Chartwells K12 today kicked-off a new partnership with the National Gardening Association/KidsGardening.org (NGA) to build gardens at schools nationwide in an effort to engage students in planting, harvesting and enjoying healthier foods. Chartwells, which provides school lunches to public and private schools across the country, will team up with NGA to help create living laboratories within schools, bringing gardening expertise to the culinary and nutrition foundation in Chartwells' schools. Within the next several months, Chartwells will initially work with eight schools with the goal of increasing efforts by the end of 2015.

Prevent Child Abuse America is teaming up with Chartwells K12 to prevent bullying where it can often take place: the lunchroom. The partnership will deliver healthy messages to students alongside the healthy food choices Chartwells serves in 3,800 schools nationwide as part of a peer abuse (commonly known as bullying) prevention campaign. The campaign supports efforts to positively change youth behaviors in light of the more than 70 percent of students who report witnessing bullying on a monthly basis.